Strange place, Swatow Plaza. Chinatown’s newest commercial complex, which opened a couple of years ago, hasn’t exactly hit its stride. Besides its buzzing basement supermarket and a few kiosques with names like New Virus, Lolita and Miss Miss, it’s a zombieville of half-shuttered spaces and abandoned hallways. So, just take the elevator straight up, past the weird retail purgatory, to Le Cristal Chinois.

When the doors slide open, it seems this is where everyone has been hiding. The panoramic room feels much higher up than it is, and exudes an odd sort of placelessness — add some taller buildings to the skyline past the windows, and this could be any number of Asian cities. It’s a massive space — total seating is more than 500 — and there’s the sense that a major banquet just ended or another one is about to begin. Chairs are dressed for a bridal party, draped in white with a bow at the back, and set around large round tables. A mounted flat screen displays photos of the food with descriptions printed beneath them. For the time it takes your focus to narrow in on your own table, it’s more like sitting down for a conference than for a meal.

Touting a top chef from Hong Kong, lots of staff, and menu items that bestow a certain cachet upon the orderer, the goal of Le Cristal is to scale up Cantonese food in Montreal. Dim sum service is a world away from the chaotic scene of clattering carts, jiggling starches and chicken feet that makes the experience so much fun. The approach is quieter, classier but still tinged with excitement: ordering happens from a fascinating full-length menu and dishes are delivered by a stream of kitchen runners, who cross items off the bill as they arrive.

Har gow is a dim sum staple, and as usual it was impossible to hold one of these dumplings without the firm, juicy ball of shrimp or its glutinous sheath slipping from the chopsticks. We found these much the same as elsewhere, but subtler: registering the lingering taste the woodsy air from the steamer, making soy or hot sauce unnecessary, was a take-notice moment.

Japanese tofu, as this egg-based version is known in Cantonese, is the consistency of the crème in crème brûlée. A rice wrapper allowed the creamy custard to be picked up, and showed off its texture and richness. When dipped in a sweet and salty sauce, this sticky white roll was pretty much unstoppable. We got more bean curd wrapped in sticky-skinned Asian eggplant, deep-fried with black bean and a shrimp ball on top, but this had less lusciousness.

A small yet nourishing plate of poached chicken, pale and tender, came with tiny cubes of taro root and mushrooms called cordyceps that have long been used medicinally. Indeed, this seemed a real restorative dish, something you might serve an invalid. If the flavours weren’t particularly distinctive, they were comforting — the soft, sweet, starchy sensations of the taro and the gentle chewiness of the fungus lingered in my mind.

The money dish of our meal, a “chef’s pick,” was rice with dried seafood steamed in a lotus leaf. A waitress cut the veined bundle open with scissors, letting the moist air out and the serving spoon in. The preserved scallops gave off a mysteriously evocative scent — for those less used to it, anyway, the aroma is wonderfully non-Western. I found it got lost among stiff grains of rice, morsels of meat, and bits of shrimp, and what started as possibly very delicate ultimately wound up a tad disappointing.

My friend compared Cristal versus the typical dim sum experience to the differences between a greasy spoon breakfast and a high-end brunch. That was exactly right on. The food was subtler, better sourced and a touch more special here — refinements reflected in the bill.

Peking duck is also done a little differently. The first course unfolds with the standard platter of sensational glazed, crisped, sweet skin, which goes into a DIY crepe with hoisin, cucumbers, carrots and scallions. The second course gets a knish-like treatment, with diced meat, carrot and celery briefly fried in tofu skins studded with sesame seeds. It’s $42 per order and listed under appetizers, with the assumption that it’s for the whole table.

I was intrigued by this larger-than-life place, intrigued enough to get the waitress to walk me through the dinner menu. It gets into uncomfortable and even unconscionable territory, with so-called luxury foods like swallow’s nest, abalone and highly controversial shark fin — there are examples of unsustainable practices on every continent, but this has to be one of the saddest foods in the world. Whether you want to sidestep these issues in the interests of culinary curiousity or cultural relativity is up to you. There’s a lot to choose from — Szechuan and Taiwanese preparations, Chinese vegetables, fresh lobster, B.C. crab, live fish from onsite tanks, and geoduck (if you’ve ever seen this clam, there’s no need to state the obvious) — as Le Cristal Chinois presents a different framework for Cantonese food in this city.

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